# FLIP: Flow-Centric Generative Planning as General-Purpose Manipulation World Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08261 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08261/

## Key facts

- Cited by 42 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and robot world models, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 40 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- World models / [Embodied and robot world models](https://mlsanity.com/wm/embodied-and-robot-world-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04104/) (2023)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02193/) (2020)
- [R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12601/) (2022)
- [Latte: Latent Diffusion Transformer for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03048/) (2024)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [TD-MPC2: Scalable, Robust World Models for Continuous Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16828/) (2023)
- [Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Atari](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00374/) (2019)
- [Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06114/) (2023)
- [VIP: Towards Universal Visual Reward and Representation via Value-Implicit Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00030/) (2022)
- [Latent Video Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13221/) (2022)
- [Transformers are Sample-Efficient World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00588/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models Are Real-Time Game Engines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14837/) (2024)
- [MimicPlay: Long-Horizon Imitation Learning by Watching Human Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12422/) (2023)
- [Any-point Trajectory Modeling for Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00025/) (2023)
- [RoboDreamer: Learning Compositional World Models for Robot Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12377/) (2024)
- [Video Language Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10625/) (2023)
- [Structured World Models from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10901/) (2023)
- [iVideoGPT: Interactive VideoGPTs are Scalable World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15223/) (2024)
- [Flow as the Cross-Domain Manipulation Interface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15208/) (2024)
- [Track2Act: Predicting Point Tracks from Internet Videos enables Generalizable Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01527/) (2024)
- [IRASim: A Fine-Grained World Model for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14540/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Ctrl-World: A Controllable Generative World Model for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10125/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models: An Action Tokenization Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01925/) (2025)
- [F1: A Vision-Language-Action Model Bridging Understanding and Generation to Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06951/) (2025)
- [Reward Forcing: Efficient Streaming Video Generation with Rewarded Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04678/) (2025)
- [A Survey: Learning Embodied Intelligence from Physical Simulators and World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00917/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models: Towards Recursively Self-Improving and Collective Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12538/) (2026)
- [3DFlowAction: Learning Cross-Embodiment Manipulation from 3D Flow World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06199/) (2025)
- [Dream2Flow: Bridging Video Generation and Open-World Manipulation with 3D Object Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24766/) (2025)
- [AMPLIFY: Actionless Motion Priors for Robot Learning from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14198/) (2025)
- [FlowWAM: Optical Flow as a Unified Action Representation for World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13017/) (2026)
- [Pixel Motion as Universal Representation for Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07817/) (2025)
- [A Step Toward World Models: A Survey on Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02097/) (2025)
- [TraceGen: World Modeling in 3D Trace Space Enables Learning from Cross-Embodiment Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21690/) (2025)
- [RULER-Bench: Probing Rule-based Reasoning Abilities of Next-level Video Generation Models for Vision Foundation Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02622/) (2025)
- [Robotic Video World Models: A Survey of Applications, Research Challenges, Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07823/) (2026)
- [Integrating Reinforcement Learning with Visual Generative Models: Foundations and Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10316/) (2025)
- [NanoVLA: Routing Decoupled Vision-Language Understanding for Nano-sized Generalist Robotic Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25122/) (2025)
- [ManipDreamer: Boosting Robotic Manipulation World Model with Action Tree and Visual Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16464/) (2025)
- [StaMo: Unsupervised Learning of Generalizable Robot Motion from Compact State Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05057/) (2025)
- [AwareVLN: Reasoning with Self-awareness for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22816/) (2026)
- [Survey of Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15201/) (2025)
- [Pixel Motion Diffusion is What We Need for Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22652/) (2025)
- [Future Optical Flow Prediction Improves Robot Control & Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10781/) (2026)
- [Reimagination with Test-time Observation Interventions: Distractor-Robust World Model Predictions for Visual Model Predictive Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16565/) (2025)
- [See Once, Then Act: Vision-Language-Action Model with Task Learning from One-Shot Video Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07582/) (2025)
- [RoboFlow4D: A Lightweight Flow World Model Toward Real-Time Flow-Guided Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17522/) (2026)
- [VLMs are Good Teachers for Video Reasoning via Adaptive Test-Time Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02564/) (2026)
- [ODEWorld: A Continuous Predictive Architecture via Physical-Time Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27924/) (2026)
- [World Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00113/) (2026)
- [μ0: A Scalable 3D Interaction-Trace World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13769/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We aim to develop a model-based planning framework for world models that can be scaled with increasing model and data budgets for general-purpose manipulation tasks with only language and vision inputs. To this end, we present FLow-centric generative Planning (FLIP), a model-based planning algorithm on visual space that features three key modules: 1. a multi-modal flow generation model as the general-purpose action proposal module; 2. a flow-conditioned video generation model as the dynamics module; and 3. a vision-language representation learning model as the value module. Given an initial image and language instruction as the goal, FLIP can progressively search for long-horizon flow and video plans that maximize the discounted return to accomplish the task. FLIP is able to synthesize long-horizon plans across objects, robots, and tasks with image flows as the general action representation, and the dense flow information also provides rich guidance for long-horizon video generation. In addition, the synthesized flow and video plans can guide the training of low-level control policies for robot execution. Experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that FLIP can improve both the success rates and quality of long-horizon video plan synthesis and has the interactive world model property, opening up wider applications for future works.Video demos are on our website: https://nus-lins-lab.github.io/flipweb/.